News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Fuck Musk and everything, but Xitter has traditionally been a very powerful tool for the masses in impoverished countries to get the word out.
I know Brazil isn't exactly a 3rd world country, but it's not exactly the most stable of governments, either. They just recently had a Jan 6th kind of coup attempt when bolsonaros lost.
I hesitate to consider this a net good, despite hating Musk.
The usefulness of Twitter ended when Musk took over. This is absolutely a new positive thing, as it’s better to use alternatives as opposed to the fascist website. There are lots of communication alternatives available, so it’s not like people won’t have a way to communicate.
The point of guerilla style social media activism that exposes oppression, is to reach as many eyes as possible.
Are there alternatives? Sure. But do they reach anywhere near the same size of an audience? Unless I'm extremely out of touch (I do not consume that kind of social media directly), then it's not even remotely close.
Maybe BlueSky is bigger than I think it is, but I rarely ever hear about it outside of very niche circles (like lemmy).
My point stands. Despite all the mishandling of Xitter, it's still a powerful tool to get grassroots news out for things like protests, oppression. The platform is certainly worse than it was before Musk, but it's still a decent tool for this specific usecase.
Guerrilla style social media activism suffers when the platform in question actively bans for reporting facts or algorithmically hides progressive voices and trends.
It also benefits the very fascists we are attempting to address by driving engagement on their platform. But no group at this time can be sure that they won’t be banned, (or worse, get Twat by Elon and end up receiving death threats) tomorrow. It’s also very risky to rely on such a platform.
But more pragmatically, these groups won’t stop organizing. The general public will also be migrating from Deadbirdsite.They’ll all use the next best tool and still persist, so there’s no real disadvantage there. If the effort can’t exist outside of Twitter, it isn’t really trying.
You use a different network tool after the last one is compromised. Usefulness matters now and in the future, not in the past.
Ok. Agreed.
But that doesn't change the fact that Xitter is still number 1 by a large margin, unless I'm mistaken. And since no one here even seems to be disputing that, it seems we agree on that point.
So it's the other point that seems to be what is controversial. That, even with all the bad shit Musk has done - maliciously gaming the algorithm so these things won't rise naturally like they did before, actively banning "woke" accounts, etc.
Even with all these bad changes, Xitter is still the best way to get your crisis message to the masses, especially outside your country.
You can argue about idealistic things like "it won't change until people are forced to look elsewhere", but that's not a luxury that people in crisis have.
And that's exactly why I think this is more negative than positive. It takes away the most powerful tool available at getting your reality out of a war zone, out of dictator controlled media bubbles, etc, so that outside observers can get a glimpse at what's really going on.
And until you have a real contender for a replacement that's gaining massive traction, "not perfect" is a luxury of armchair activists.
When the need arises people will use whatever works best for their purposes. I doubt it will be Twitter again, but who knows.
The good thing about uprisings is you you can't predict how it'll spring up. That's part of what makes them successful.
You're better off focusing on a different platform though.